My, my... Cats and dogs living together!
I wonder whether they are trying to convince people who need windows applications, or if it's a competition thing.
Google plans to allow Windows 10 to run on its budget Chromebooks, with the Chocolate Factory’s blessing. Chatter has been discovered in the low level source code of a branch of the Google Pixelbook firmware code that would seem to indicate that Google is working on providing drivers that Windows 10 needs to run. The Github …
"ChromeBooks have gained the ability to run Android applications, and more recently Linux binaries too."
Do you think that they'll be executing Windows applications within the ChromeBook ecosystem?
Sooner or later, the various OSs will just run each others' apps. In the same way that a refrigerator can keep both meat and fruit cool. It just won't matter.
How? It'll be virtualization all the way down.
Some chromebooks costs a couple of hundred quid, some cost a grand so hardware will be variable and I wonder if Windows will only support a minimum spec so only the more expensive chromebooks will have it as an option.
Either way, my aincient chromebook runs linux anyway.
Some chromebooks costs a couple of hundred quid, some cost a grand so hardware will be variable and I wonder if Windows will only support a minimum spec so only the more expensive chromebooks will have it as an option.
They're pretty much going to have too. The 8gb Surface Go costs just over 500 notes, despite the availability of an equivalently specced Chromebook for 300. That's a pretty big different - even if the Chromebook lasts half as long as the Surface (and I know of no reason why it should), you'd be better off with a Chromebook as the 2nd upgrade would be 'free'.
I say this as a lifelong MS dev......
It's no good MS looking at Macbook prices and using them to set the cost of a Surface - 3 or 4 years from now I can flog a Macbook for almost half what I paid for it, the 2nd hand Surface won't run anything like that level of residual value.
Without the premium price, how else would these Surfaces look "better"?
I might pay a premium price for an Aston Martin, but I'd not pay it for a Ford. The brands are different market segments. Apple is, completely unfathomobly to me, "cool"; Microsoft just isn't and it will never be.
So how would a Surface look better? Well, it'd do more - most apps run on Windows, certainly most professional level apps (I care not how many fart apps your phone has). That's not to say stuff doesn't run on linux, of course it does, but Windows is the desktop/professional user GUI (sorry penguins, it just is). Leverage that for "better", but just making it expensive means I'm not buying one - residual value is a thing if you upgrade every few years.
I'm sure we're talking a pared-down Windows 10 S or something like that, but with Google's "everything in the cloud" mentality, will they be able to fit more stuff on a Chromebook, or will they have to expand the storage?
I have purchased dedicated Windows 10 tablets before, and even 32GB disappears too quickly.
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I'll bet Google see this as a way to stave off Surface sales - "We run your familiar Office apps too", meanwhile M$ see it as a way to do the exact opposite and penetrate the Chromebook market, and are busy putting together a suite of crippleware for it - "Our apps work so much better on our own hardware".
The licensing deals would make interesting reading.
I am reminded of George Orwell's Animal Farm, in which the rest of the animals could no longer tell the pigs apart from the men they were doing deals with.
> Windows 10 support adds native printing - an alternative to jumping through hoops with Google’s cloud printing service or an OEM equivalent - and management capabilities to the humble Chromebook.
I just VNC or FTP into my humble Raspberry Pi (with CUPS etc installed) and I can network print, scan and do loads of cool stuff with no probs - apart from being a bit slow sometimes.
M$? - no thank you.
Exactly, he just described the hoops you have to jump through to get printing working, and at a slower rate as well. At the same time though I find it hard to imagine that the very people who aren't willing to jump through those hoops are likely to go through the trouble of installing windows on a Chromebook instead of just buying a window laptop.
I bought a little micro computer thingy on Amazon, which was basically equivalent to most Chromebooks: wimpy Atom processor, 32 GB of dog-slow flash storage, 2GB RAM. The plan was to install Ubuntu server, but it came with Windows 10 preloaded. Out of morbid curiosity, I fired it up to see how it ran.
As one would expect, running 10 on that hardware was excruciating. The only thing it did quickly was get worse, as Windows filled up the meager flash storage with non-declinable updates and then consumed all available RAM and CPU cycles for >8 hrs installing them. Even after the update spasms had subsided, it was an absolute dog.
Windows 10 should run passably on premium hardware like a Pixelbook, but it will be bitterly disappointing on the zillions of $200 Chromebooks.
There are some new Chromebook ads running on TV over here, and they specifically target Windows error pop-ups and the BSOD. Will be interesting to see how they work their way back from that marketing strategy. "All the power of Google with all the inconveniences of Windows!" Maybe with a photo of Big Brother as the default desktop background image?
"For as long as no one else can open documents and such reliably from other vendors."
Can anyone open Office documents reliably? My experience was that MS couldn't reliably open their own docs on different versions of their own application. But at least on Linux the doc that had meant Big Red Switch time with MS Office on Windows only hung LibreOffice and not the entire OS.
I suspect that the selling point to corporations is that everybody can have a Chromebook and the management tools, but those who need it can run Windows or Linux on the same hardware. The TCO could be considerably lower than for a Windows fleet with a number of machines running Linux or Macs.
"Now they are pretty much equivalent to all the other 2G Celeron cheap windows 10 home machines"
Except for the ones that run i3 or i7. Of which there are now a fair number.
Though I prefer ARM ones as I have no intention of running anything Windows. I have a box or two for that.